Complexeity of real C# code compared to tutorials

Nico Callewaert

Hi all,

I'm wondering already long time why tutorials compared to real examples are so different. I mean, I learned C# from a good book. In understood the chapters and the examples. But afterwards I studied a real program that was running in a production environment, I didn't understand a single thing of it anymore. Real code seems so very different in complexity compared to books. I'm wondering where such people get the knowledge that no book seems to cover or they just enjoy themselves writing overly complex code that nobody except themselves seems to understand ?? Also if you download source code let's say from MySQL server or other systems, it's really not understandable and it's code that is not even near to the ones you find in tutorials.

Just wondering how to get to such level of programming or maybe that is not needed ?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Nico

2 Replies

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Nico Callewaert12y ago
Thank you very much Vulpes for the reply !
Vulpes12y ago
Yes, it's true that 'real life' code does tend to be more much complicated than the sort of code you find in books or online tutorials.

There are several reasons for this, including the following:

1. Code in books tends to concentrate on one or two objects at a time. In real life, the developer may have numerous interacting objects to deal with.

2. There's a tendency to make code concise by having a long chain of object references rather than using intermediate variables.

3. Great as they are, LINQ and lambda expressions do tend to produce complex and hard to read code.

4. Many developers like to use design patterns. Whatever the merits of these, they can make code virtually unintelligible to other developers who are not familiar with the design pattern in question.

5. Real life code often needs to inter-operate with COM objects or other unmanaged code. Although .NET does a good job of hidng the underlying complexity, interop code does still tend to be complex and may involve concepts which are foreign to the .NET developer.

Although some additional complexity is inevitable (and you just have to get used to it), this doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to write code which, within reason, is as easy to read as possible. If you don't, then it's likely to come back and bite you (or a colleague) when it needs to be maintained months or years down the line!